New Note Cards

I love putting together a new set of farm cards for the wool festival each fall. Can't believe it's just two days away...again.





Speaking of cards, I have No Idea what I'm painting for our Christmas card this year.

Any suggestions?

You'd Almost Think...

We were planting them out here.



This is actually a five leaf, hopefully even more good luck!



And the focus here is how neat it is to find a special clover in your dye garden, not that there is a big weed that needs to be removed...

Right?

Luckily For Graham Lamb

No cameras were harmed in the filming of this documentary. Because even if it was my fault for setting my camera bag down...

Hmmm - what do we have here?



Yeah! What is it???



It's MINE, I can tell you that!



Hey Pal, you really think you should be messin' with that?



I didn't think so.



And one more thing for Hank to take care of. Of course Keebs gets by with anything ;-).

Sunday Stills - The Letter S

Spindles - for the wool festival next weekend.



Shine - Keebler's pretty curls. Different sheep produce different types of wool. Longwools are known for their lustrous shiny curls as opposed to "fuzz".



Sunshine through Woolliam's cool 'do.



Slobber. Spit. Saliva.



I really tried to type Sheep here, but Stupid keeps showing up instead. I will defend most sheep's intelligence...except Peabody. He's handsome though and grows a lot of springy quilt batting. Everyone's got to be good at something ;-).



Surveillance. If you look closely, you'll see my camera bag. That's a funny story for tomorrow. And involves Graham Lamb. Of course.

For more Spectacular Sunday Stills....

The Scapegoat

In the past when something "happened" here on the farm, Graham Lamb was the first name out of my mouth. Then came the day of the great yarn caper. I blamed B. Willard.



B. Willard is very sneaky. And he frequently feels the need to run past me and eat carrot tops from the whiskey barrels in front of the barn. He's so cute though that I can't help but laugh as I chase him down the shedrow.



When I found the carrots stripped of all their leafy green-ness the other day, I knew 'who done it'.

WILLARD!!!!



And then, on closer inspection...



I found six Swallowtail Butterfly caterpillars.



"This is getting a little old!"

The Birds And Bees

I had some company yesterday afternoon while I was taking yarn shots. The hummingbirds had some company too. They were none too happy.



See the bee to the left of the feeder? The dark strip on the right (messing up my favorite hummingbird shot to date :-/) is the edge of the porch post. Of course.



Between the bees, wasps and flies, the hummingbirds are at their wits end.



And apparently the wasps are pretty nasty about it as you can see by the bird (how many times it's size?) shying away.



An epic battle.

This drought has been awful. For everyone.

Yarn

I really wanted to title this post Yawn, but when I'm really tired, things I think are clever...are most likely, um, not.



Quickly, the yarn is here. It's really nice. I LOVE the colors.



Of course I had to take some out for a test drive. A+

I can see some fabulous hats and mittens, big barn sweaters, warm cabled scarf?

Fun!

One Half Of Fat Annie

I'm headed to Ohio Valley Natural Fibers tomorrow and wanted to be able to drop off as much remaining 2010 wool stash as possible while I waited for them to run a couple fleeces. This was my last fleece to wash.



It is actually not an Equinox Farm fleece, but one from CSL Pam. She'd stored it for several years hoping to spin it herself, but realized she was more into the sheep than the spinning and sent it to the wool house. I was concerned it wouldn't wash up well (I've been told fleeces should be washed within one year), but obviously it's beautiful. Doesn't it look like meringue?



As I unwrapped the sheet and started pulling out wool, I pulled....and pulled...and pulled. It was like a clown car - the wool just kept coming. This is the biggest fleece I've ever seen.

Fat Annie.

I think she's a Texel/Cotswold cross - one of Keebler's kin. That table is 4'x6'. This is one half of her fleece. The other half is still in the washer.



This will be a hard fleece to sell. For me to sell that is. I'm sure I'll keep some to make something special for her mom...yeah, yeah, that's what my excuse will be - wink wink.

There looks to be pounds and pounds of Fat Annie and it will all be processed into roving and ready for anyone to spin (these fleeces practically spin themselves so are great for beginning spinners). You might have to look for it under a table at Falmouth though.

Or ask Saint Tim. He'll sell anything...and without a spec of remorse ;-).

Two Weeks Late

It's looking like a trend, folks. Sunday Stills from two weeks ago...Boots.



Sadly this is also a statement on how long it's been without a big rain. Or really any rain.

Two Days Late

The clouds the other day didn't bring us any rain relief, but the sunset was neat.



This photograph is close, but not really. The sky was on fire.



You know when you see sunbeams streaming down, it's called Jesus light.



Um, what if it's red and coming from the basement?

Just sayin'.



The moon rise. I know why the moon looks like half of it is missing, but I still find myself staring in wonder.



What do you think the cave men thought?

I play with moon shots frequently. Between the low light and weight of the 300mm lens, I naturally find it impossible to get a good shot hand held. I have a tripod, but usually am too ornery to go get it, so have used fence posts, tree branches, gates...to try to stabilize my camera. A bean bag is a good option too, but again have not put one together yet. As a funny aside for Linda - I grabbed your bag of Colorado pinto beans the other night to take a picture of our Kentucky moon.

We should all go out at the same time one night and take a moon shot. That might make a fun Sunday Stills challenge!

I Thought...

...if I had time to put up a blog this morning that it would have to be titled Day Late... I took some (I hope) really pretty sunset pictures yesterday, but ended up too tired to download and post them last night. It felt sort of, well, day late-ish to post them this morning. I found a surprise in my inbox though - an email from Fleury Sheep and Wool. They are bustin' it trying to get our yarn ready for the Kentucky Wool Festival.

You can see some pics of Belly's here: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?id=257489347565&pid=5101298#!/pages/Fleury-Sheep-and-Wool/257489347565 There's a photo album called Punkin.
We are very close to finished!
-Jared

I stole these photos off their Facebook page. First, I should probably confess that I don't have a Facebook account. I've tried it out a couple times, didn't love it and figured I had way more to do than I have time for already and don't need one. more. thing. to maintain get sucked into. However, a friend was over one day and wanted to show me something on her Facebook page and because of that, Facebook still recognizes my computer and I can sneak in and see stuff. I was very excited to see these pictures.



White in the pin drafter



Getting spun into singles



Outside the skein winder

While I was snooping around (okay, I'll admit it was sort of fun ;-) the Fleury's page, I saw a link to a funny story on NPR. I'll steal share that too.

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.

You've surely heard certain people described as letting themselves be herded around like sheep. Now the sheep have struck back. They defied the stereotype at the Great Montana Sheep Drive. Hundreds were supposed to go down Main Street in the town of Reed Point. Possibly confused by rain, the sheep refused to be driven. They wandered around, got lost behind a saloon and finally left town, serving as an inspiration for us all.

It's MORNING EDITION.

I'm not sure what made me smile more - the delight in seeing yarn from the Belly's (remember the momma and baby sleeping together the other day? The white is mostly the baby's - Caspar Belly) or the thought of a bunch of sheep sneaking off behind a saloon.

Where oh where is the Far Side when we need him???

By the way, according to their Facebook page (guess I'm going to have to give it another try), it looks like the Fleury's are going to be at SAFF this year. I am totally going to run down there (it's a great festival, so no real rubber arm twisting involved) and meet them. They have been wonderful to work with and the yarn looks great. I can't wait to see it and Saint Tim's probably hoping it doesn't get hidden under a table where no one else can see it... ;-)

Beyond excited!

Boiling Bees

Not really, but that's what it looked like.

Stella had fall honey ready to extract the other day. We usually set everything up on the porch, leisurely scrape the wax cappings from the frames, set them down into the extractor, spin them out, watch the honey drain into the strainer pans, ooh and ahh at the beautiful color...



Not this time. I was working up at the barn and came to the house to find Stella and our friend Jane in the kitchen frantically removing bees from...well, everything. They were everywhere! Here the bees are cleaning up honey drips in the pan the cappings are scraped into.



Cleaning up a spot of honey on a cotton towel.

I'm guessing due to the lack of rain and few flowers blooming, the bees are in a frenzy. We carefully checked the 2 big boxes on each hive (the ones the bees live in and store the honey they need for winter) and all felt heavy enough for this time of year. The honey we take from them is excess honey they store in the small boxes on top. I think the bees that swarmed the porch were from a less productive hive out by our garden - not Stella's bees from up on the hill.



I had fun trying to capture the movement of bees with a slower shutter speed. Click to biggify.



Most of the bees were orange and black, but notice the mostly black bee on top of the pile? I'm not sure if that's a different strain of domestic honey bee or a wild bee from somewhere else.



A bee mosh pit in the top strainer pan. You can see the bits of wax as they dig into the pile to make sure not a drop of honey is missed.



Working on the bottom as well.



Doesn't it look like a boiling pan of bees? Sadly I'd turned my microphone down and you can't really hear how loud they were.

It took them a couple hours, but by dark everything was spotlessly clean and everyone was back in their respective hives. Just amazing!

We are going to start offering some sugar syrup to the garden hive. The other small honey supers on the rest of the hives are just about ready to harvest. We'll check them once more in another week or so and take what we can and feed the rest back to the bees.

If we could just get a little rain, we might still get some fall flowers - asters and goldenrod are the biggies - and everyone could get back to normal. If not, we'll cook up some syrup and return the favor. No one goes hungry around here, especially if Stella is cooking ;-).

Pick Your Pillow

There has been a lot of this going on around here...but only for our four legged friends. Fall is a busy time of the year anyway and I'm also trying to get things finished up for the Kentucky Wool Festival, which is just a couple weeks away - yikes!



Miss Emily and her youngest baby, Caspar Belly. They sleep like this all the time. Caspar Belly has a lovely fleece, but the best we can figure some sort of sheep IBS. After trying to treat it for over a year, the advice was to cull her.



Even if she didn't have a nice fleece, there is no way I could stand to take her away from her momma.



Poor Woolliam doesn't have such a comfy pillow.



At least Joshua has some straw padding for his.



Don't let the big stretch fool you. He was not fixing to "go make the donuts". Just repositioning.



Elizabeth: Is there something we can help you with?